Many organizations address time problems by redesigning boxes and lines: who does what and who reports to whom. This exercise tends to focus almost obsessively on vertical command relationships and rarely solves the underlying disease: the poor design and execution of collaborative interactions. You're not the first to think there must be a better way.

In our efforts to connect across our organizations, we're drowning in real-time virtual interaction technology, from Zoom to Slack to Teams, group texting, WeChat, WhatsApp, and everything in between. There's seemingly no excuse to not collaborate. The problem? Interacting is easier than ever, but true, productive, value-creating collaboration is not. And what's more, where engagement is occurring, its quality is deteriorating. This wastes valuable resources, because every minute spent on a low-value interaction eats into time that could be used for important, creative, and powerful activities.

It's no wonder a recent global survey found around 80 percent of executives were considering or already implementing changes in meeting structure and cadence in response to the evolution in how people work in the post-COVID-19 epoch. Indeed, most executives say they frequently find themselves spending way too much time on pointless interactions that drain their energy and produce information overload.

What can be done? We've found it's possible to quickly improve collaborative interactions by categorizing them by type and making a few shifts accordingly. There are three broad categories of collaborative interactions:

• Decision making, including complex or uncertain decisions (for example, investment decisions) and cross-cutting routine decisions (such as quarterly business reviews

• Creative solutions and coordination, including innovation sessions (for example, developing new products) and routine working sessions (such as daily check-ins)
  
• Information sharing, including one-way communication (video, for instance) and two-way communication (such as town halls with Q&As)
  

See brief explanations for each of these categories in the following graphics:

Let's dive deeper into each category to uncover potential solutions:

Decision making:

When you're told you're "responsible" for a decision, does that mean you get to decide? What if you're told you're "accountable"? Do you cast the deciding vote, or does the person responsible? What about those who must be "consulted"? Sometimes they are told their input will be reflected in the final answer—can they veto a decision if they feel their input was not fully considered?

It's no wonder one of the key factors for fast, high-quality decisions is to clarify exactly who makes them.

Role clarity enabled easier navigation for employees, sped up decision making, and resulted in decisions that were much more customer focused. To make this shift, ensure everyone is crystal clear about who has a voice but no vote or veto. Don't underestimate the difficulty of implementing this. It often goes against our risk-averse instinct to ensure everyone is "happy" with a decision, particularly our superiors and major stakeholders. Executing and sustaining this change takes real courage and leadership.

Creative solutions and coordination: Open innovation

Routine working sessions are fairly straightforward. What many organizations struggle with is finding innovative ways to identify and drive toward solutions. How often do you tell your teams what to do versus empowering them to come up with solutions? While they may solve the immediate need to "get stuff done," bureaucracies and micromanagement are a recipe for disaster. They slow down the organizational response to the market and customers, prevent leaders from focusing on strategic priorities, and harm employee engagement.

On the other hand, successful employees' empowerment, counterintuitively, doesn't mean leaving them alone. Empowerment requires managers to give employees both the tools and the right level of guidance and involvement. Leaders should play what we call the coach role: coaches don't tell people what to do but instead provide guidance and guardrails and ensure accountability, while stepping back and allowing others to come up with solutions.

Managers who are great coaches, for example, have typically benefited from years of investment by mentors, sponsors, and organizations. It is obvious that organizations should do more to improve the coaching skills of managers and help them to create the space and time to coach teams, as opposed to filling out reports, presenting in meetings, and other activities that take time away from driving impact through the work of their teams.

But while great coaches take time to develop, something as simple as a daily stand-up or check-in can drive horizontal connectivity, creating the space for teams to understand what others are doing and where they need help to drive work forward without having to specifically task anyone in a hierarchical way. You may also consider how you are driving a focus on outcomes over activities on a near-term and long-term basis. Whether it's OKRs or something else, how is your organization proactively communicating a focus on impact and results over tasks and activities? What do you measure? How is it tracked? How is the performance of your people and your teams managed against it? Over what time horizons?

As you start this journey to a more creative environment, be sure to take a close look at psychological safety. If employees don't feel psychologically safe, it will be nearly impossible for leaders and managers to break through disempowering behaviors like constant escalation, hiding problems or risks, and being afraid to ask questions—no matter how skilled they are as coaches.

Information sharing: Fit-for-purpose interactions

An increasing number of organizations have begun to realize the urgency of driving ruthless meeting efficiency and of questioning whether meetings are truly required at all to share information. Live interactions can be useful for information sharing, particularly when there is an interpretive lens required to understand the information, when that information is particularly sensitive, or when leaders want to ensure there's ample time to process it and ask questions. That said, most of us would say that most meetings are not particularly useful and often don't accomplish their intended objective.

Many companies are moving to shorter meetings (15 to 30 minutes) rather than the standard default of one-hour meetings in an effort to drive focus and productivity. Making meeting time a scarce resource is another strategy organizations are using to improve the quality of information sharing and other types of interactions occurring in a meeting setting. Some companies have implemented no-meeting days.

Finally, no meeting could be considered well scoped without considering who should participate, as there are tangible financial and transaction costs to every meeting participation. Leaders should treat time spent in meetings as seriously as companies treat financial capital. Every leader in every organization should ask the following questions before attending any meeting: What's this meeting for? What's my role? Can I shorten this meeting by limiting live information sharing and focusing on discussion and decision making? We encourage everyone to excuse yourself from meetings if you don't have a role in influencing the outcome and to instead get a quick update over email. If you are not essential, the meeting will still be successful (possibly more so!) without your presence. Try it and see what happens.

As a summary: quality, planned and focused interactions can improve productivity, speed, and innovation within any organization—and drive better business performance. We at DGTL hope the above insights have inspired you to try some new techniques to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration within your organization.